head to head · open source
devdocs vs atomic
devdocs has 39,596 GitHub stars, 2,656 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped yesterday. atomic has 2,001 stars, 143 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. devdocs leads on adoption by 1,879% (39,596 vs 2,001 stars). devdocs is written in Ruby under MPL-2.0; atomic is written in Rust under MIT. devdocs has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, atomic 7%. devdocs was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| devdocs | atomic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 143 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick devdocs if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick atomic if
- You want the atomic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and atomic fits your workflow better
About devdocs
DevDocs — API Documentation Browser DevDocs combines multiple developer documentations in a clean and organized web UI with instant search, offline support, mobile version, dark theme, keyboard shortcuts, and more. DevDocs was created by Thibaut Courouble and is operated by freeCodeCamp. We are currently searching for maintainers Please reach out to the community on Discord if you would like to join the team! Keep track of development news: Join the contributors chat room on Discord Watch the repository on GitHub Table of Contents: Quick Start · Vision · App · Scraper · Commands · Contributing · Documentation ·…
read the full devdocs overview →
About atomic
☁️ Atomic Cloud — Atomic, hosted at your own subdomain. Try it out for free. Everything below still self hosts forever. A personal knowledge base that turns markdown notes into a semantically connected, AI augmented knowledge graph. Atomic stores knowledge as atoms — markdown notes that are automatically chunked, embedded, tagged, and linked by semantic similarity. Your atoms can be synthesized into wiki articles, explored on a spatial canvas, and queried through an agentic chat interface. Wiki synthesis — LLM generated articles with inline citations Canvas — view your knowledge on an interactive graph Semantic…
read the full atomic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is devdocs or atomic more popular?
devdocs has 39,596 GitHub stars and atomic has 2,001. devdocs has the larger community by that measure.
Are devdocs and atomic free?
Both are open source. devdocs is licensed under MPL-2.0 and atomic under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between devdocs and atomic?
devdocs is written in Ruby and atomic in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, devdocs or atomic?
Choose devdocs if you want the larger community (39,596 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose atomic if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.